Inside, alone for a moment in the middle room, Haffner looked around. Behind Haffner, a boy was cycling along a mountain path. His path wobbled with the trembling grip of the super-8 camera which was working so hard to preserve his balance for eternity. A girl who was more real, in sunglasses and a bracelet made of pink plastic paperclips, was watching this film, intently, while shifting her feet to the beat from the DJs behind her. The boy continued pedalling, now observed by an ecstatic parent in mint-green sunglasses, encouraged by the severed hand of the camera operator.
Was this what the kids were up to? wondered Haffner. Their mania for nostalgia took them this far? This farrago of the sentimental. The kids observing the kids. Whereas all Haffner had wanted, as a boy, was the adult. He had wanted to wear a tie, to wear a suit. The two girls DJing were drinking from the same pink straw in the same glass of Coke. Although Haffner rightly doubted if it contained only Coke.
In this setting, his tracksuit, he thought, was more appropriate than he had imagined. Around him there seemed to be no dress code, no fashion which Haffner could recognise. The laws were gone.
So much posturing at the infantile! But now that he was old, Haffner rather applauded this resistance to the adult: the spirit of the flippant. The bare midriffs; the obvious bra straps; the visible panties. Everything in fluorescent colours. He warmed to this; as he warmed to everything which seemed unimpressed with the adult world. The nostalgia, perhaps not. But the infantile, this the older, less mature Haffner could admire.
Viko was offering to buy Haffner a drink. Haffner looked round. He suddenly realised that Niko was gone. With a depressed shrug, Haffner assented. He watched Viko lean against the bar, a man at ease. And Haffner tried to understand what was meant to happen next. He had hoped to avoid this, the time alone with his masseur. Their business relationship had been maintained with surprising ease, thought Haffner. This still did not resolve the question of where they stood more privately: what conclusion had been drawn after Haffner's curtailed massage. The problem was how seriously Viko thought that Haffner had taken it. Preferably, their relationship would have ended in the fog of its ambiguity — stranded, on a mountain top, with the night coming on, and only the cowbells for company.
Viko returned with the drinks. They chinked glasses, plasticly. Then Viko moved closer to him.
Viko, of course, didn't want Haffner. He only thought that Haffner wanted him. If there were more ways to make money from Haffner, then Viko was happy to explore those ways. He was a man of mode. The older men went for the younger men: this was the story of Viko's life. They offered you money to let them touch you; or watch you. So went the ways of the Riviera.
Haffner placed a palm on Viko's chest, girlishly: in a cute gesture of rebuff. Viko looked at it. He removed Haffner's palm, and held it tight.
He was drunk, Haffner. He was gone. He was there, at the crest of his ascent — in the glory of his absolute inspiration: just before it transformed itself, as if nothing had happened, into the absolute descent.
The descent of the grandfather, however, was being deftly matched by the ascent of the grandson. Even if, at the moment, this ballet was suffering from problems with timing. Oblivious to his future ascent, Benjamin was depressed. He was standing at a corner of the bar: trying to lean forward enough so that the deep folds of his T-shirt could hang down in a perpendicular line. For Benji's body in these clubs became a pastoraclass="underline" the hillocks of his breasts, the trilling streamlets of sweat which ran between them.
This was not the kind of club in which Benjamin had ever felt happy. His grandfather's phone call, however, had disturbed him. So here he was, in his excited fear, and he felt alarmed. Packed as the club was with assured and sexual girls, it presented multiple temptations to Benji's soul. The temptation of lust, naturally, but also the darker temptations: of self-pity, and self-disgust.
His reaction to this state, before his Orthodox training, used to be a prolonged session at the bar, followed by a session of manic dancing. And it was to this practice, haunted by his recent erotic memories, worried for the safety of his grandfather, that Benjamin, against his moral code, returned.
His yarmulke was now stuffed, shyly, in the pocket of his jeans.
How many of his beliefs, considered Benji sadly, were really just romances? It seemed so very likely that his moral code was a romance too. It was all too possible. Benji wanted to be there in the Jewish East End: with Fatty the Yid, the fixer, handing out betting slips in Bethnal Green. Could he have told you why? Wasn't it obvious? These people had cool. On one street there would be Jewish Friendly Societies, for Benjamin's relatives, newly emerged from Lithuania; and a house which concealed a miniature synagogue, whose ceiling would be azure with gold stars, and below which, on the walls, would be engraved in gilt the names of its benefactors — the Rothschilds, the Goldsmids, the Mocattas, the Montagues. Had Benjamin not been born too late, what a member he would have made of the Bilu Group, of Hovevei Zion! A group which he had once admired for the sarcastic praise they had bestowed on their nation for having woken from the false dream of Assimilation. Now, thank God, thou art awakened from thy slothful slumber. The pogroms have awakened thee from thy slothful slumber. No, thought Benjamin, this was the melancholy truth. In his identification with the marginalised, the bereft, he had been wowed by the romance of belonging to an elite. Because the persecuted could be an elite, of this he had no doubt.
Inside him lay Benjamin's grand emotions: envy, anxiety, self-hatred, self-contradiction. There they were, in their plush velvet case — snug, like a cherished heirloom; a polished silver piccolo.
They seemed unnecessary now.
Beside him, sitting on the plastic pod of a stool, a girl began to talk to him. She didn't want to talk to him about the state of his soul, nor the state of world politics: the endless problems of minority peoples. She only wanted to ask him what his plans were that evening, what his girlfriend's name was. Benji sadly admitted that he had none: no plans, no girlfriend. She offered him a cigarette. Her name was Anastasia, she said. And when somehow Benjamin inveigled into the conversation a mention of his Jewish origins, she looked at him. There was a pause. This was it, he thought: the moment when everything became obvious.
— Uhhuh, she said. So anyway.
He looked at Anastasia. She was the tallest girl he had ever met; and although he could not help remembering the distracting features of the girl to whom he had lost his virginity, he also could not help feeling that in Anastasia he had discovered something so much more refined. She was wearing a black shift dress, black tights: and red high heels. Her hair was cut in some sort of slick bob. There was a plastic butterfly visible on her left, diminutive breast.
— You are American? asked Anastasia.
— British, said Benjamin.
— Is better, said Anastasia.
And at that moment, as she shifted her weight, so accidentally placing her thigh in warm proximity to Benjamin's podgy hand, Benjamin finally noticed Haffner, talking to a man. He stalled in a trance of indecision. And although this was why he was here — to protect his wayward grandfather — Benjamin did nothing. He did not excuse himself and go to offer Haffner his protection. He simply looked into Anastasia's eyes, smiled, lit a cigarette which she had offered him, and desperately, feeling sick, hoping that he would not regret this, tried to take up smoking.
The smoke here was mythical. It was its own clouding exaggeration — not just in the usual secret places: one's nostrils, the creases of clothes. Here, it hurt the cornea, the tonsils, the ganglia of one's lungs.